Johnny Depp testified on Wednesday that visual effects artists added a "normal finger" to his hand for the fifth "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie because the middle finger on his right hand was severed in 2015 after Amber heard threw a glass vodka bottle at him.
"They would put little green dots on the splint or whatever, the bandages," Depp said on the stand. "So in post-production, they could use what's called computer-generated imagery, CGI, to erase the bandage and replace with it a normal finger. And that's how we finished the film."
The 58-year-old actor took the stand in a county court in Fairfax, Virginia, on Wednesday as part of his defamation suit against his ex-wife, accusing her of ruining his reputation and career by saying in a Washington Post op-ed that she was a victim of domestic violence.
Heard has countersued Depp for $100 million and denied the claims in his lawsuit, claiming he did physically abuse her multiple times throughout their relationship.
The actor said the incident happened during an argument on March 7, 2015, prompted by him attempting to get Heard to agree to sign a post-nuptial agreement. He and Heard were living in a house in Australia as Depp reprised his role as Jack Sparrow in the "Pirates of the Caribbean" franchise.
Depp said the stress of the argument prompted him to drink shots of vodka in the home he and Heard were staying in while filming the fifth installment of the franchise, "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales."
Depp then said Heard followed him to the home's bar, yelled at him for drinking again, and threw two bottles at him, one of which made contact with his hand and sliced off his middle right finger.
"It made contact, and it shattered everywhere," he said. "I honestly didn't feel the pain at first, what I felt was heat, and I felt as if something were dripping down my hand. Then I looked down and realized that the tip of my finger had been severed, and I was looking directly at my bones sticking out and the meaty portion of the inside of your finger."
Depp said he initially lied to doctors about how the tip of his middle right finger had been severed because he didn't want Heard to get "in trouble."
"I didn't want to disclose that it had been Ms. Heard that had thrown a vodka bottle at me and then took my finger off," he testified Wednesday. "I didn't want to get her in trouble. I tried to just keep things as copacetic and easy as possible for everyone. I didn't want to put her into that mix."
Heard painted a different story of the night of the incident, saying the fight was caused by her witnessing Depp take out a bag of MDMA when he was "supposed to be clean at the time." She accused Depp of shoving her, choking her, and throwing objects and alcohol at her. She claimed Depp cut his finger by himself by "slamming a hard plastic phone against the wall."
"I did not throw a vodka bottle — or any other kind of bottle — at Johnny, not did I cause that injury to Johnny's finger," she wrote in a statement in response to Depp's lawsuit.
Keenan Wyatt, a sound technician who's friends with Depp and worked on all of the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies, testified earlier in the trial that the movie's crew shot scenes that didn't involve Depp's character while he was getting surgery for his finger. Depp testified that when he returned to set, producers came up with "a special effects trick" of putting green dots on his bandage so that it could later be replaced with digital imagery of a normal finger.
"Dead Men Tell No Tales" was released to poor reviews in 2017 and ultimately grossed less than any other movie in the franchise except for the first one, which was released in 2003. Disney hasn't produced a sequel, which Depp in his lawsuit blamed for the damage Heard has done to his career.
"The reaction to Ms. Heard's false and defamatory op-ed was swift and severe," his lawsuit said. "Just two days after the op-ed appeared in the Washington Post's online edition, Disney publicly announced that Mr. Depp would no longer be a part of the 'Pirates of the Caribbean' franchise."
